‘Omic’ technologies adopt a holistic view of the
molecules that make up a cell, tissue or organism.
They are aimed primarily at the universal detection
of genes (genomics), mRNA (transcriptomics),
proteins (proteomics) and metabolites
(metabolomics) in a specific biological sample in a
non-targeted and non-biased manner. This can also
be referred to as high-dimensional biology; the
integration of these techniques is called systems
biology (Figure 1)(see Box 1 for a list of
definitions).1,2 The basic aspect of these approaches
is that a complex system can be understood more
thoroughly if considered as a whole. Systems
biology and omics experiments differ from
traditional studies, which are largely hypothesisdriven
or reductionist. By contrast, systems biology
experiments are hypothesis-generating, using
holistic approaches where no hypothesis is known
or prescribed but all data are acquired and analysed
to define a hypothesis that can be further tested.3